Posts tagged ‘coopers’

There is much to be said on the subject of bottle conditioning, and one thing is becoming extremely clear to me: have patience young brewmaster. Now two weeks into the bottle conditioning process for the lager carbonation is now noticeable in the glass. The green notes of the beer have tapered off dramatically, and when poured into a very clean container the beer actually forms and holds a nice white head. Now that’s what I call progress.

At this rate after another week of bottle conditioning I would be confident in premiering the beer to other people, and confident I will need to be since I will be doing just that at a get together with friends this coming Saturday. That will mark three weeks of bottle conditioning for the lager, and hopefully too much won’t end up on the floor in culinary disgust.

In other news I decided to halt the lagering process on the Endless Sail Orange Lager as atmospheric temperatures have risen to unsuitable temperatures. Therefore I went ahead and bottled the contents of the half gallon growler jug with a teaspoon of priming sugar in each. As it turns out my calculations were right on and the growler jug filled only two of my bottles which in a way excites me.

Extrapolated out that means a 5 gallon batch should only fill 16 of my bottles. Since I have 32 of these 740ml bottles I should be able to brew and bottle two 5 gallon batches at a time. Neat!

Looks like it’s about to get pretty busy around here in the land of brewing.

Things are starting to look more promising with the bottle conditioning lager. The beer has been bottled for 11 days out of the estimated minimum 21 days required for the beer to properly self carbonate. At this stage the plastic bottles are becoming much more firm and much more like commercially carbonated bottles of soda.(more…)

It has now been a week since I bottled the X01 brew. I didn’t cover the bottling experience as it is a pretty banal experience, but I will say this: The Coopers Microbrewery Kit makes bottling straight from the fermenter extremely easy and expanding to more advanced techniques of secondary fermentation very straightforward.

Being completely impatient with the bottle conditioning process I could wait no longer and chilled my very first bottle of homebrew. I knew that most guides and advice insist that one wait at minimum 2 weeks before tasting the brew, but I was interested in seeing just how the relatively green beer met my expectations.(more…)